Archives for July 2018

The other day Trump announced that the U.S. economy had over 4.0 percent growth for the last quarter. You can imagine his other comments around this. It was fabulous, best ever, only the start of spectacular things, blah blah blah.

I found this particularly amusing as my portfolio had the biggest one day decline since he took office (and another big decline today.) So was the president lying in his statement? Of course he was! He always lies.

And by the way Obama had over four percent growth in four different quarters of his presidency. Trump also said he inherited an economic mess – not true! Obama inherited an economy in the toilet from W’s terrible economic decisions and devastating tax cuts and huge spending. Of course, Trump put W’s econ prescriptions to shame by inflicting the biggest deficit in our history with no way to pay for it.

Today the president boasted about the great number of jobs he has created. Of course Obama created more jobs for the same period of time.

Wages. Trump says they’re going up. The graphs show otherwise. Since he took office wages have been going down steadily.

So what boosted the economy in this past quarter? The tariffs. (See they’re working!) Oh wait, what? Certain companies stocked up on U.S. products and raw materials fearing the trade war would get worse and they wanted to have the stuff on hand so they wouldn’t have to pay more later. Sorry, but that ain’t happening in the next quarter.

In fact what is fueling any growth in the economy has been the policies that Obama laid down, and they have continued into the Trump presidency. However, if you look at the charts, since Trump has been in office all those factors have slowed, and begun a downward trend. Days before this most recent decline (and Trump;s announcing his great economic success) one economic pundit I was reading had been saying that yes the rally had been going on for quite some time, but it wasn’t really outside the norm for rallies, and that this rally, in his opinion, would continue for some time even though there are signals that it could end. This person argued that even with those signals the rally would continue for another year and that in previous years before the end of a rally huge gains would happen. What to do? His suggestion was invest in the stocks that got us here. The so called FANG stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google). What led the decline the other day? The FANG stocks.

In other economic news Mic Mulvaney, head of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) who has savaged the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) now says – Huh, they were right all along. In fact they were better at the numbers than we were, and we were not as optomistic.

Imagine that? A Trump economic person not being as good on these things as people who do this for a living?

When you look at what Trump has done in any area that has become involved it’s a repeatable pattern. He attacks some imaginary foe or wrong. Then based on this ill founded belief he comes up with some pronouncement. There is no plan. Then after having put his subordinates in a bind, he makes up stuff to support his ill informed decisions.

This is a man who is uneducated, ill informed and likes it that way. His policies and ideas are therefore based on fantasies and myths. It can only get worse.

In other news:

The Mueller probe continues. Some in the house are trying to impeach the Asst. AG. And Don Jr. and Robert Mueller were spotted Friday at the airport, waiting at the same gate. To get to that gate you have to take a bus. Did they take the same bus?

There was a mime going around a few days ago that purported to be one of Trump’s professors at Wharton. The man said Trump was one of the dumbest students he ever had. I think dumb is different than stupid. Stupid suggests a physical inability to learn and understand, while dumb may also suggest that one has no interest in learning – even if one has the capacity, a certain incuriousness, call it a laziness.
I recently saw a video clip of a professor of linguistics being interviewed about Trump’s manner of speaking. What he said was Trump only has an informal way of speaking, which is on the level of an adolescent, someone who never developed the skill and polish of formal speech. He and the interviewer mentioned a number of items that fit into this pattern. The use of “tags” at the end of a sentence, such as” “Believe me,” which are oral place holders like “you know.” Also the use of visual or audio tells, such as, “People don’t know,” or “A lot of people don’t know.” This translates to “I just learned.” However, it couches the speech so as to project the alpha-male one-step ahead mentality. The linguist also said Trump is dismissive and belittling rather than building and decorating. He is numb to the artful. He talks in this way most likely because he has little to say, because he has few insights, yet he keeps talking and he needs words and phrases to fill the time. This is in line with the definition of a narcissist who talks all the time.
Trump himself has admitted that he never studied in school because he thought he didn’t have to because “he had a good brain.” Talk about dismissive!
So what can we conclude from this? The man is without artifice. He is uneducated and likes it that way.
The linguist also brought up the point that since the 60s we have been going through a process of being more informal. However, there’s a time he said to “put on your Sunday best speech,” like when you’re president of the United States.

Madonna by Edvard Munch

This tracks back to something I have mentioned many times, the idea of good manners and etiquette. Many people turn their noses up at etiquette. “We don’t need all that fancy stuff,” is the usual reasoning. Likewise with manners the argument is a little cruder, especially around table manners, “what difference does it make, the food all ends up in the same place.” Both arguments miss the point. Etiquette allows one to have a blueprint for what to do in a given situation (“Where do I sit at a wedding if I’m a guest of the bride?”) Manners make life more pleasant. (No one wants to see little Johnny swirling his food around in his mouth or being elbowed by him because he fist grabbed the fork, lowers his head toward the plate and shovels the food in.) However, in the 60s we, my generation, rebelled. We rebelled against the war, the establishment, and all the norms our parents had tried to teach us. If you grew up in the sixties your parents grew up in World War II and the Depression. Their grandparents grew up in the Victorian Age. We rebelled against much of the Victorian norms.
But can that go too far?
Absolutely. We see it in Trump. We see it in ourselves and our children.
We need a return to civility, to good manners, to the idea of fair play. All that has been washed away. It needs to come back. If for no other reason than it makes our world a more pleasant place.
I’m tired of the bullies, the churlish, the greedy, the uninformed, the caustic, the mean.
It’s time for them to go.

Legal commentators when asked what the purpose of having this stuff about Michael Cohen’s assertions that Trump knew about the Trump Jr meeting that was going to take place with Russians before the meeting took place and then that Trump got filled in about it by his son have commented that it’s weird to be having this play out in the media. It seems to not serve either Trump or Cohen. The only explanation that any of them gave that makes a bit of sense is that sometimes a person who is being tried in the court of public opinion lashes out and speaks their mind. This could be what both Trump and Cohen are doing.
Did Trump lie about the meeting with the Russians that his son had? Yes? He’s already shown that he’s lied about it. The question now is – is he lying more than before? Some say they don’t know. Let me clear that up for you. Yes, he lied more.
In a funny (sad) aside Rudy Giuliani has said Cohen is a liar and has always been a liar. Trump has said similar things. What makes this funny is that the news shows run videos from as recently as last April where both of those men are saying what a fine upstanding person Michael Cohen is. We can debate whether Cohen lied, but clearly both Giuliani and Trump are lying because you can’t say someone is both upstanding and a liar. Is Cohen lying? He has lied, but is he about the Trump Tower meeting and Don Sr. knowing about it? No.
Here’s why. First, as I’ve said before, it is well known that Trump Sr. has his hands on everything going on in Trump Tower and his businesses.
Second here is an interesting timeline of events:
Early 2016 – Cohen goes to Prague, secretly, to pay off the Russian hackers. (This has not been confirmed, but I suspect will be sometime in the not too distant future.)
June 3, 2016 Trump Jr gets email from Goldstone (Russian intermediary) inquiring if the Trump campaign wants dirt on Hillary. Jr responds with “I love it.”
June 6, 2016 Trump Sr gives speech saying early next week he’ll be giving a speech about dirt on Hillary (and people will be very surprised. This by the way is the same line he used on sending people to Hawaii to dig up Obama’s birth certificate. He claimed people were going to be “very surprised by what they are finding.” Never heard more on what the people in Hawaii found.) Trump never gives speech. (What happened?)
June 8, 2016 DCLeaks is set up by Russian GRU to dump Hillary’s emails (when it is revealed it’s the Russians they switch to the cover of Guccifer 2.0, whom Roger Stone contacts.)
June 9, 2016 The Trump Tower meeting.
July 13, 2016 Trump says in a speech “Russia if you’re listening I hope you can find the 30,000 missing emails…”
July 13, 2016 GRU starts spearfishing attempts on over 300 Democratic operatives.

I’m an evidence based kind of guy.
There can be coincidence. There can be smoke and no fire. There can be two things that appear to be connected and aren’t.
But here we have a series of events that if they aren’t connected it’s really hard to explain.
The most likely scenario is that Trump Sr thought Jr was going to get dirt on Hillary on June 9th. He didn’t. So Trump Sr asked the Russians again on July 13th.

This morning I saw Rudy Giuliani talking about Michael Cohen. He asked, “Which lie do you want to believe? The first one? The second one? The third one?” Be careful what you wish for Mr. Mayor.
I instead would like to flip the question and ask which truth do you want to believe? One or all of them?Nancy Maclean and IShe’s the author of Democracy in Chains

Let’s start with hacking, and more than likely Russian hacking. There have been reports recently that it is more than likely that someone got into the voting machines in 2016 and changed votes. Why do I say this? There is a new report in the news fringe (typically this is where such things of this type are first reported than a few months later CNN or MSNBC or some other entity has a big BREAKING NEWS headline of this sort of thing.) The new report says there was a hack-a-thon and one of the hacks was a test to see if anyone could get into the voting machines used in U.S. elections. Not only did they get in, they got into everyone they tried. In some cases the states (Georgia was singled out as an example) the state keeps no paper record, therefore no audit is possible. Also, one particular kind of voting machine has an easily hackable password and it is the same for every one of their voting machines. One of the hackers was a teenager and he used Windows, a mouse, and a Word file to get into the voting machines. So I ask you, “What’s the possibility that a sophisticated Russian military operation could get into voting machines in the U.S. and do what they wanted?” Let’s put a number on it. Is it 0%, 10%, 99%, or 100%?
It turns out that our intelligence community knew about certain states being hacked and didn’t tell them until months after the election. To which I say WTF?
Last week there was evidence that hackers had gotten into computers that control our electric grid. Claire McCasgill has reported that Russian hackers tried to get into her computers this week. If they are trying to get into her computers, who else are they trying to hack into?

Let’s move onto Truth #2 – corruption. A Federal judge in Maryland has ruled on emoluments, specifically what they are, and surprise surprise, it’s what the dictionary defines them to mean. What does this mean for Donald Trump and his businesses? Well, it means that a lot of stuff falls under that category. In other words he’s in violation of the Constitution. Does it matter? Well, to be fair the right was jumping up and down about emoluments when Hillary Clinton had her picture taken with a donor to the Clinton Foundation and she was Secretary of State. So what if the guy was a head of state? Emoluments! The Constitution. Lock her up, etc. (Let’s not forget the shameful display of the Attorney General going along with the chant of Lock Her Up, by repeating it, earlier this week.)
So what’s Congress going to do? We’ll talk about that below, there’s more to get to here.

Michael Cohen – oh boy. Well, it turns out there aren’t a dozen tapes, there are hundreds. To corroborate the fact that Trump and Cohen discussed on the one tape released the payment method to the Playboy Bunny the Southern District prosecutors are pulling in Trump’s CFO. A man who has been with Trump since the 80s, and was with Trump’s father. He is reputed to know where all the money is and where it went. One commentator said today that when the cover is pulled back on Trump’s business dealings what we will find is decades of sleazy and possibly corrupt business practices.
Michael Cohen says he can link Trump Sr. to the infamous meeting that Trump Jr and son-in-law Jared and then Campaign Manager Manafort had with Russians in Trump Tower and that Sr. knew about it and approved of it before it happened. Why and how? Well, Michael says nothing went on in Trump Tower without Don Sr. knowing about it. Add to that that Trump Jr. reportedly runs and tells his dad everything. Sr. says he knew nothing about it because it was so unimportant that no one would bother telling him. Trump Jr. says that there’s nothing to tell because nothing came of it. That he forgot about it. When I heard that clip being replayed today it reminded me of the reporter who covered a wedding of a prominent family and didn’t file a report. When his editor asked him why he didn’t file a report the guy said the groom didn’t show up so there was nothing to report.

Truth #3 – What’s Congress doing? They’ve been busy. Yes sir. They filed impeachment papers against Rod Rosenstein. What happened to the concern about emoluments? What about presidential overreach? etc. etc. etc. All gone.
What about the Russians hacking our electric system, our election systems? No concern whatsoever.
What about the president being in league with or a pawn of the Russians? So what?

Meanwhile the Parkland kids are going around the country to districts that are represented by as they say “Sellouts to the NRA” and working to get more young people registered to vote.

Will it make a difference? I hope so. But it won’t if the Russians are hacking our voting machines and switching votes.

Hopefully, folks are getting pissed off and are willing to pay attention and stop trusting that “he has a plan.”
It’s way past time to get rid of this guy and his band of imbeciles, grifters, Russian agents, and crooks.

In other news one of Betsy DeVos’ family yachts was set adrift. It’s one of ten they own. It’s worth $40M. Damage was estimated in the tens of thousands of dollars. Thank god her family got that big tax break so they can repair that sucker.

1,024 Days to Go

PS Me with author Nancy MacLean who wrote Democracy in Chains that outlines the plan of the Koch brothers and others on the far right to enslave our democracy.

The Trump administration used a depression era law to give farmers that have been hurt by his farm tariffs a ton of money. Surprisingly, when reporters asked exactly how were these farmers going to get this money and which farmers exactly were going to get this money, the administration had no answers and said they were working on it. This fits into how the Trump administration works, which is not shoot, aim, ready; but shoot, shoot, shoot, what?
Trump has courted farmers and he’s trying to do so with these tariff payoffs. Some have called them political bribes.
The “farm problem” has been around before and ever since economics was created as a field of study. No one has solved it. Here’s the problem. If a farmer grows a crop and all his fellow farmers grow the same crop then the price they get is determined by who wants to buy that crop. If they, the farmers, have a bad year then there isn’t much of a crop, prices go up, but there isn’t much to sell so the farmer makes a lot of money on what he sells but he doesn’t have much to sell. Likewise, in a good year he has lots to sell, but so do his fellow farmers; the price goes down, and he doesn’t make much money. That in a nutshell is the “farm problem.”
All sorts of solutions have been tried by the government. They have tried buying the surplus (we now have caves in Wisconsin filled with cheese.) They’ve tried trade deals with other countries Like NAFTA, which allowed farmers in Iowa to sell their corn to Mexico at a cheaper price than the Mexican farmers could make it. This drove the Mexican farmers out of business. They left their farmers and moved to the cities where they had nothing to do and were prey for the drug gangs. We’ve tried paying farmers to grow wheat, which they did big time, in places that wheat could grow for a year then ruined the soil, which led to erosion, and in some cases they stirred up dry lake beds and various poisons that ran down stream destroying what had been good fields. We’ve tried supplementing farmers to grow corn and soy beans, especially in Iowa, which when they get torrential rains wipes out the field taking the fertilizer with it, which runs down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers into the Gulf of Mexico where it creates a giant algae bloom, which kills everything in the area hurting the shrimp and fishing industries.
Sixty seven percent of farmers voted for Trump. So how do they like the tariffs and the payoffs? They hate them. Why? Well, if you’re a farmer and you’ve planted your crop, you’ve got a lot of time to worry about the weather, the price you’ll get for your crop, and how various factions in the government are doing things to hurt you.
As soon as Trump announced his tariffs the futures prices of corn and soy beans plummeted. They’ve been yo-yoing up and down ever since, but they’ve been going down. Farming his a long term proposition. Many farms have been handed down generation to generation. Most farmers have loans that stretch out twenty and thirty years. Farmers are conservative, economically conservative. They have to be, because they are in for the long game. What’s the worst thing they can face? Uncertainty about their crop and the price they will get for it.
Trump and his Agriculture Secretary are desperately trying to reassure farmers that they’ve got their backs. This however is running into some harsh sentiment. Farmers don’t like the government telling them what to do (although farmers get more money from the government than any other group. Please, don’t call it welfare! That’s what poor people get. Farmers get subsidies. [Wait could we solve the poverty problem in this country by stopping welfare and starting subsidies? ] )
Here’s the problem. The handout (please, don’t call it a handout!) that farmers are getting is only for one year and it doesn’t take effect until next year. So is the bribe (please, don’t call it a bribe!) just something to mollify the farmers through the election? That’s hard to say because that would suggest that the Trump administration has a plan, which seems to be the anthesis of what they do.
Farmers want markets to sell their products, that means customers. They have spent years developing customers in Mexico, China and elsewhere. It’s not like you can throw a light switch and turn this on and off. It takes time. Farmers want policies that help them develop and keep markets, not bandaids. The Trump administration has thrown a giant light switch and given some farmers a small bandaid.

In economics one often talks about “guns and butter” to symbolize factory and farm. We’ve looked at the farm, how’s the factory doing. Remember Trump put tariffs on steel too. How’s that working out? Well a small firm in New Jersey that makes commercial dishwashing racks says their cost of steel has gone up 26%. If you’re making stainless steel dishwashing racks I gotta think that’s most of the raw materials that go into the product. From what I know about manufacturing if it costs 25 cents to make something, you have to assume it will sell retail for one dollar. That’s for a retail operation, maybe the percentages are a little different for industrial goods. But if I’m right that means the cost increase would mean a rise of 4 times 26% or 104% for the major raw good. Maybe, it’s not that bad, but it’s bad.
Yesterday General Motors said the steel tariffs have cost them a billion dollars. But you know what? Obama saved General Motors and the auto industry in America. Donald Trump seems bent on destroying everything Obama did, will he destroy the auto industry? Stay tuned. I wonder how those folks in the rust belt that voted for Trump and are in the auto industry are feeling right now?
If they are like the farmers or the folks that lost their jobs at Harley Davidson they are thinking, “He must have a plan.”
Let me let you in on a little secret, a secret that is right in front of your face.

TRUMP HAS NO PLAN!

Well, hold on. He’s hoping to get that vacancy in the Supreme Court filled with a guy who says the president is above the law. That’s his plan. So what if he’s the deciding vote to overturn Roe v Wade? He doesn’t have a vagina.